Fantastic portal for event planning, registration and management

If you ever coordinate events for clients (or yourself) you need to know about EventBrite. The website allows you to create an event, let people register, sell tickets, and even accept payment online. It’s a fantastic tool that is free (other than the payment portal) and greatly assists in tracking attendance and communicating with attendees via email. Check it out for yourself at www.eventbrite.com

Time Management Tip – chunk your day

Many virtual assistants struggle with managing their time. Some work all day, and since the office is at home, they can work all night completing projects, looking for new clients, researching virtual tools, using social networking sites… Sometimes this time in front of the computer pays off, but for many, it’s time spent without much to show for it.

Others find that their focus is pulled in other directions. Laundry needs to get done, they don’t want to miss Oprah, they spend an hour talking with the neighbor who was outside walking the dog… Next thing they know, the day is almost over and little work was done to grow their business or assist their clients to the best of their ability.

If you have difficulty with time management, chunk your day. Schedule your day so you complete what is needed. If you need to spend time following up with new business leads, schedule it on your calendar for an hour chunk. Need to complete a project for one of your clients? Add a 90 minute chunk to your calendar. This works for fitting in workouts and other personal time as well as business items. If it’s scheduled on a calendar, most people will commit to doing that activity at the scheduled time.

Commit to focusing on the tasks you schedule and not letting phone calls, emails, or anything else interrupt you. Chances are you will find yourself much more productive, you will have more to show for your workday, and you will have more free time.

What are other time management tricks you use in your day?

Home Office Essentials for the Virtual Assistant

You are thinking about becoming a virtual assistant but don’t know if you have the right software and equipment? Here are the basics.

• Computer with high speed internet

• MS Office software

• Printer

• Fax capabilities (either e-fax capability or a physical fax machine will do)

• Unlimited long distance calling, preferably from a dedicated home phone line

• Hands-free devise for your phone to make it easy to talk and type

• Anti virus program for your computer

• A backup storage system for electronic files (external hard drive, or my favorite – an automatic backup program like mozy.com, ibackup.com, or carbonite.com)

• A quiet and comfortable place to work

Anything else will depend on the services you are offering and the clients you will be assisting. The basics listed above should be enough to get you started.

Free webinar service provider is changing

DimDim has been growing in popularity in the last few years, as a wonderful place to host webinars for little or no cost. Turns out that virtual assistants and entrepreneours were not the only ones taking notice. SalesForce has purchased the company and is integrating it into their framework over the next month. Time to start making the transition to a new provider if DimDim used to be your webinar or screen sharing solution.

We’ve heard good feedback about freebinar.com, yugma.com, and of course, gotomeeting.com. What are your favorite services to use?

Online form solution

Google has done it again. They have created yet another cloud-based solution for virtual assistants and businesses. The online form. It sounds simple and even a little boring, I know. But here’s what makes it great.

1.     The forms are easy to create

2.     They look professional and have themes and question types you can use

3.     The results get automatically put into a spreadsheet for you

4.     You can easily create charts and graphs with the data collected

5.     It’s part of the Google Docs offerings, so if you already use Google Docs, the forms are a natural progression

Try it for yourself: http://www.google.com/google-d-s/forms/

Learn to be more PRODUCTIVE

Do you ever feel overwhelmed? Like there is just too much for you to do? Do you want to be able to get more done with less effort, but aren’t sure how?

If you are currently less productive than you’d like to be, it can affect you in a variety of ways – lost opportunities, frustration, overwhelm, and embarrassment, just to name a few. Most importantly it can keep you from spending time with family and friends and result in significant lost revenue.

There is a FR*EE live telesummit September 20-24 where 5 experts will all be sharing their areas of expertise to help you be more productive immediately.

DATES: September 20-24, 2010

TIME: 1:00-2:00pm Pacific / 4:00-5:00pm Eastern

WHERE: From the comfort of your home or office

Register Now …

www.productivebusinessowner.com

On these calls, you will learn real tips and solutions including:

• How to FINALLY make your email work for you – no more out of control inboxes
• What free or cheap programs can help you go paperless and run a more effective business
• Specific ways working with a virtual assistant has made a very successful business owner even more productive and successful
• How to master your energy throughout the day with a couple simple daily exercises
• How to easily delegate work to others and get the results you want

Plus, all speakers are giving away extra bonuses to help you be more productive immediately.

If you want different results in your business and life, you have to take different action! Without a doubt, being more productive will dramatically affect the type of opportunities you attract and how successful you can be in business and in life, and this telesummit will help you get there.

Go to this link right now to learn more and register before all the spots on the bridge lines are taken.

www.productivebusinessowner.com

Time Saving Website: ZAMZAR

Visit www.zamzar.com to convert one type of document to another type, even without owning the software! This is useful for converting PDFs back into Word or vice versa.

   Poof – and it’s done